The invention relates to billing for replying to a message in a communication system. The invention relates especially to billing for replying to a message transmitted in a mobile system.
A mobile system generally refers to any telecommunications system enabling wireless communication while users are moving within the service area of the system. A typical mobile system is the public land mobile network (PLMN).
The services offered through telecommunications systems, especially mobile systems, improve continuously. Especially the number of services provided through various messages to subscribers have continuously increased. In addition to text-only short messages, services comprising multimedia messages are also provided today. These various message services have in common that they use servers added to the system. Short messages, for instance, are always transmitted through a short message service centre and WAP (wireless application protocol) multimedia messages are always transmitted through a WAP server.
Message services are implemented in such a manner that the sender of a message is always billed for the message he sends. There are, however, situations where the person who transmitted the original message would like that a reply to the message was billed to the sender of the original message. This is, however, not possible with prior art message services.